A Blog of Things

The Internet of Bella Things

Mon Apr 15 16:59:21 +0100 2013

Last week, I was invited by the nice people at CREATE-NET to speak at the First Italian Internet of Things Day event that they held in Trento. It was the first time I'd visited Italy since I lived in Turin in 2008, and it was lovely to go back, if an all-too-short trip. There was an interesting mix of attendees and discusions, and some good debate following on from my talk about whether Europe, and Italy in particular, with its long history of design and networks of small and creative manufacturers could leverage that to lead the way in the Internet of Things. I think there's a real opportunity there, and would love to discuss it further. Anyway, here are the slides from my talk, along with my notes of what I intended, at least, to say...

I’m Adrian McEwen. I’ve been adding the Internet to things other than computers since 1995. Initially cash registers, then PDAs and mobile phones - that picture is a mobile phone dev board which ran the first web browser to run on a mobile phone, back in 1997.

Since 2008 I’ve been playing around with even lower end hardware, in the form of Arduino boards, and run MCQN Ltd., an Internet of Things consultancy (for want of a better word) and these days I’m in charge of the Ethernet library for Arduino.

I’m also Chief Technology Officer for Good Night Lamp, more on Good Night Lamp later…

And I’m writing a book on the Internet of Things, which will be out later this year.

Lots of developments in the Internet of Things is moving from industry, where sensors and process control have been improving efficiency. There is a place for this, for example, these photos are from an R&D project we did to stick a load of sensors to monitor the food levels in silos on a chicken farm, and that was all about knowing when was best to send out a truck full of chicken feed. But as that bleeds into everyday life…

…we get things like the Internet Fridge, which will automatically reorder food for you, and choose what you’re going to eat based on the expiry date of the contents.

Or smart cities with parking meters which will make sure the city never misses out on a cent of parking fees.

It is a very top-down, controlling view of how we might want this technology to help us.

I want to present an alternative vision of the future. And as I’m speaking here in Italy, I want to steal an Italian term for it.

When I came to live in Turin a few years ago, one of the guidebooks was explaining the term bella. The straight translation to English is beautiful, but according to the guidebook that didn’t capture the true meaning - in English, beautiful is just about the appearance of the object, whereas bella also captures some of the integrity and inner goodness of what is described.

Rather than the Internet of Things, let’s aim for the…

Internet of Bella Things.

(Apologies for the poor Italian grammar, but I think the “Internet of Belle Things” would be assumed to be borrowing from French rather than Italian by English speakers)

Our devices should still be beautiful in how they look and work. This is Ugle, from Voyoslo. It’s a lovely turned wooden owl, which you control remotely via an iPhone app. The users decide what the colours mean to them, so maybe blue is ”I’m heading home” and green is “ring me when you get chance”

The Internet of Things needs to be open. Fully open hardware (such as the WhereDial pictured here) lets us build on each others work to make better objects, but at the very least we should be building open APIs and protocols for the IoT devices and services to interoperate and work together. The Internet was successful not because it is neatly controlled from one central location, but because it isn’t — it is a collection of services and machines following the maxim of small pieces, loosely joined.

This is Russell Davies’ Bikemap. It shows which Boris bike stations near his flat have bikes available, so he just glances at it on his way out of the door. It doesn’t tie into his calendar to guess where he’s going and just direct him to the “right” bike station, it just extends his senses to give him more information to decide what to do. If he wants to get a coffee from his favourite cafe, and the bike station next to it might not have any bikes he can still do that, without having to worry about a device continually trying to direct him elsewhere.

Build better tools for humans to use, rather than building systems to replace the humans.

This is the Little Printer, from BERG. It’s a gorgeously designed device that can print off things that would be useful when printed on something the size of a receipt. However, when you aren’t interacting with it directly it sits quietly, not intruding on whatever else you’re up to. Even when there’s something to print it is very quiet about attracting your attention. A small white light pulses softly on the top.

That’s what we should aim for — if the Internet of Things causes the proliferation of devices that is predicted, I don’t want my life to be full of little boxes all beeping and flashing to try to get my attention.

The Good Night Lamp takes the idea of integrating the technology into your life one step further. When you turn the Big Lamp on, the associated Little Lamp will also turn on, wherever it is in the world — which lets you stay in touch with loved ones more easily. And the reason the Big Lamp is larger is because it’s also a functioning lamp. You don’t have to think about whether or not to send a message to your mum, or husband, or whoever has the Little Lamp, you just turn it on because it’s dark and you need some light.

Finally, just because IoT devices run with less processing power and a more limited interface doesn’t mean that they have to interact with the Web through some intermediate service. Our experience with the mobile Internet and WAP has shown us that devices only gain widespread adoption when they talk directly to the servers on the web without being hidden behind some proxy.

It’s a bit harder to build, but far from impossible. Bubblino was built back in 2008 and downloads Atom feeds directly, just like any RSS reader on a PC would.

The City is Here for You (or God?) to Use

Thu Dec 27 16:59:21 +0000 2012

CC-BY-NC John Lucas: Old Street roundabout comp II

I met up with an old friend Paul Ede, who is researching Urban Ecotheology, inspired by the Finnish academic Seppo Kjellberg’s book of that name. Though theology is very much not my topic, it was fascinating to see how it relates to urbanism (the idea of Heaven as a city, in contrast to the original rural garden of Eden).

According to the cover blurb, Kjellberg presents “a cosmological instead of an anthropocentric attitude towards the city and all that lives within it.” Of course our focus, as relates to IoT, has always been specifically about how it relates Humans, and much less about how it can be used by industry or governments, much less God. Similarly, Adam Greenfield’s recent summary of his upcoming book The City is Here for You to Use presents a humanist view, opposed to threats from “semi-autonomous agents of a nonhuman, indeed nonbiological, nature, from drones to algorithms” (#13), from a notion of the “Smart City” predicated on a “neoliberal political economy … disturbingly consonant with the exercise of authoritarianism” (#28), and from the “colonization of everyday life by information technology” (#97).

I’ve already mentioned this excellent essay on Twitter, and found it near impossible to quote selectively from. However what I found myself discussing with Paul and his wife Esther were the sections which looked at how technology is altering our notions of memory and self within the city:

#74. The ability to trivially search the space of a city is leaching away at the constitution of a quality we have always recognized as urban savvy or savoir faire.

This is a flipside to the portable mapping and reviewing technologies that we rely on to find shops, entertainment, transport, food. Perhaps technological savvy has simply become a part of urban culture? Is “the Knowledge” still important to London taxi drivers now that they have GPS navigation?

#44. These technologies redefine surveillance. It is no longer something which takes place exclusively, or even primarily, in the audio and visual registers, or, for that matter, in real time.

#75. The persistent retrievability of personal information is undermining the city’s capacity to act as a chrysalis for personal reinvention.

#76. Technologies like high-resolution positioning and algorithmic facial recognition are destroying any promise of anonymity we thought the metropolis afforded.

Data-mining information that has already been recorded, and triangulating it with other sources can allow unprecedented and unexpected levels of detail in retrospective “surveillance”.

The volume of information on social media, government databases, CCTV (in conjunction with face recognition algorithms) make it harder to lose ourselves in the city, and by losing ourselves becoming something new. This could be as trivial as trying to forget an irritating school nickname, as aspirational as pretending to being a bigshot to make important connections, or as essential as starting a new life on a witness protection scheme.

#77. Cities depend vitally on informal, illicit, even deviant economies, which are threatened by a regime of eternal, total and trivial visibility.

This is so suggestive, though I only partly understand it (I would be fascinated by any comments on the nature of the deviant economies that cities depend on!) The “regime of eternal, total and trivial visibility” is the Panopticon on a huge scale, and if Bentham was disappointed by the failure to ever implement his vision for a single prison, imagine the scope when applied to entire cities and nations! While Rob Van Kranenburg has spoken passionately of A proactive vision on a full Internet of Things where the lights are on where there is “no more corruption, tax evasion, black markets” and “all inefficiencies in political decision making processes” are exposed, Greenfield suggests that perhaps these “inefficiencies” are in fact part of what makes it possible to live in cities as humans.

Playing with the Electric Imp

Fri Dec 14 12:50:53 +0000 2012

CC-BY-NC-SA adafruit: Electric Imp with April: Basic Prototyping

The Electric Imp guys had very kindly passed Adrian a handful of Imps to evaluate. I missed the opportunity to get Shaun Myhill to walk me through using it at the IoT Howduino at DoES, but he and Antony McLoughlin worked together to create the Dirty Win-imp. I finally got my grubby hands on them yesterday to wire one up to an accelerometer.

While the experience was quite frustrating, and it felt like the product just wasn’t “ready” yet, the hardware and concept are really cute, and if all the teething problems get sorted out, it’s a genuinely useful idea, and rather different than developing on Arduino.

First of all, a disclaimer: this experience represents me charging into the world of Electric Imp half-cocked, without reading everything upfront. I may have missed obvious clues or explicit documentation due to my own inattention!

All the smarts of the Imp, as well as its wifi connectivity, are located in the SD card shaped microcontroller. But to get it to do anything, it has to be plugged into a board (an “Impee”) which provides power, pins, and so on. The SD form factor is very cute and feels robust. The card doesn’t actually work as an SD card, which is a bit odd, but using an existing form means they can take advantage of cheap components designed for it. The Impee I’m using exposes 6 GPIO pins, which isn’t anywhere near as many as an Arduino, but this really isn’t a problem, as we’ll see.

The Impee can get power either by soldering a connection to a battery, or via USB. I connected via USB, but this only powers the device, and doesn’t let you communicate to it, as it only speaks via wifi… this means you have to program it without any means to input your wifi settings ;-) The Imp team have solved this bootstrapping problem using a very clever idea called “Blinkup”. They have smartphone apps for iPhone and Android which emit alternating white and black screens in a code which is then read by the Imp’s light-sensor. While this is very nice (and it’s so appropriate to be literally “flashing” your microcontroller), the implementation needs a little polish.

First problem: you need an iPhone or (recent-ish) Android. You’re stuck if you are still using a dumb old Nokia, like both me and Adrian… Bafflingly there isn’t a way of using a computer screen, such as the one on my laptop. I eventually borrowed an iPhone from John McKerrell and flashed the chip with the DoES wifi details.

After it rather unimpressively failed to do anything obvious, I looked up the diagnostics for the Imp’s flashing LEDs, and here’s the next problem: the documentation is fragmented and poor. The front- page of electricimp.com is nicely designed but even the “for developers” page doesn’t link to the wiki. Navigating between the wiki and the “Planner” app is also confusing. Eventually I found a page on status codes and determined that it wasn’t connecting to the wifi. Checking the iPhone app, it turns out though it worked out which network I was connected to, it didn’t pass across the password, so you are supposed to type it in yourself. Once I’d done that, the flashing process worked very nicely.

With that done, the imp appears in my planner, and I am prompted to choose a firmware. I choose the blank firmware. You can edit the code in a rather pretty online code editor. However, the way I’d chosen the firmware, it was opened read-only… I really don’t understand why this wasn’t an editable copy. Eventually I figured out how to Add Node, and cargo culted some code from the examples. There aren’t very many examples yet, but that will only get better as and when more people start contributing.

The Imp uses a language called Squirrel This is a dynamic scripting language, but with a syntax derived from C. That’s handy to know, because it’s sparsely documented and impossible to google, because Squirrel is such an overloaded term. When I searched for “Squirrel Language”, my top hit was for the language of squirrels in the massively multiplayer computer game Dofus. (In case you’re wondering, the squirrel language “is related to English, but with dominating use of letters ‘i’ and ‘k’” – Skiikrikik ikinknikgikinkj.) Similarly, searching for terms like Squirrel include module or Squirrel trigonometry will almost always give you completely useless results. The documentation itself is correct but insufficient. The atan2 function belongs to the math library, but how do you use this library? It turns out that you can use #include <math> like in C, but don’t need to, because it’s included by default. However you have to preface the function with the library name, so you call it like math.atan2(). You can guess these things if you know C-like languages, but really it would be nice not to have to.

Pushing the code is a joy. You simply save the code, and reboot the Imp (by ejecting it and plugging it back into its impee). The Imp recognizes which Impee it is in, and (if it can connect to the internet) downloads the new code automatically. At this point, you get any error messages: this shows how dynamic the Squirrel language is… even though the process is quite fast, I would have liked some kind of pre-flight checks, but never mind. The error messages are shown in the editor window, as are messages output by server.show() – I liked this a lot, as it made debugging so much easier than on Arduino, where you have to use the serial console, and there is no automatic output about runtime errors. Also, because the language is more dynamic, you can easily coerce integers into strings, e.g.

server.show(x + "," + y + "," + z);

which also makes logging and debugging relatively pleasant.

The output of server.show() is also sent to the planner screen, where it’s shown on the “node” box for the Impee. When you’ve only got the one Impee running, this isn’t especially impressive, but I can really imagine this being useful once you develop an ecosystem of them.

I mentioned that the lack of pins wasn’t a real issue. I more-or-less successfully attached my accelerometer, and ported some Arduino code to it, to convert the analog data into angles. This only leaves 3 pins and a ground left, which isn’t a lot to do anything useful. But if you look at the planner, you can easily add another Impee, and pass data from one to the other. This is even more powerful when you think about “virtual Impees”, which are software based nodes running on the electricimp.com servers. At the moment, the virtual nodes are hard-coded into the app, e.g. you can’t write your own. But once they allow you to write your own nodes, you have an easy form of modular reusable components (and for bonus points, the server based nodes could be written in a real high-level language such as Javascript instead of Squirrel…) For example, one node could post to Twitter, or another could run a Twitter search. Connect those up to the appropriate physical Impee and you’ve recreated an iconic IoT device like Bubblino or Bakertweet. But connect a number of these nodes together and you’re rapidly multiplying the complexity and capability of what you can do, without ever having to worry about the processing power, or I/O connectivity of a single physical node. Each physical Impee will do one thing, and do it well, in sharp contrast to the trade-offs we make when developing on Arduino, where we have to cram many pieces of functionality onto a single board, with a small amount of available memory. (I’m not being quite fair here – much of the smarts of the WhereDial, for example, are actually located on the mapme.at servers, rather than on the Arduino. Perhaps it’s more that the Planner style of the Imp actively encourages you towards this kind of modularization, by having affordances such as the easily configurable “Make HTTP Post” virtual node, or the “Push data to Cosm” node.)

Also bear in mind that the Impees don’t have to be on the same network: this makes it a plausible implementation infrastructure for products such as the Good Night Lamp, or for monitoring systems over a number of locations. This is of course because the Imps don’t mesh with each other, but rather with the central server. This is of course a possible counterindication for using them: do you trust them with your sourcecode? Do you trust them to continue existing? If they close, will it be possible to reconfigure the Imps to point at another provider who can host the code? If you get big, and want to configure the planning infrastructure more then the Electric Imp team want to facilitate for their general customers, will you be able to host and develop the infrastructure for yourself?

These days we are quite happy to host much of our social and business communication and storage infrastructure online with, so the idea of running the Imp code online isn’t actually all that much of a stretch. The Electric Imp has great potential to find a niche that we weren’t even aware existed, but at the moment it doesn’t feel quite ready yet.

Dirty Windows, Social Media Shelves and more - The Internet of Things Howduino

Wed Nov 21 21:45:00 +0000 2012

Clare showing off her POV-POI. CC-BY-SA JR Peterson

Originally posted on Adrian’s blog

Over the first weekend in November we crammed DoES Liverpool with around fifty hackers, artists, geeks and designers and tasked them with coming up with interesting and new ideas for connecting the real world at the Internet of Things Howduino.

Before the event, my biggest concern was that people wouldn't have come up with suitable projects to work on over the weekend. To try to encourage the creative juices I asked a couple of Internet of Things luminaries to come up with briefs to push people beyond the usual temperature monitors. As you'd expect, Usman Haque - founder of IoT service Cosm.com - and Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino - CEO of Good Night Lamp - didn't disappoint and after the intro we kicked off the "what are you going to make?" discussion with a read through their proposals, plus a couple of more basic ones that I'd added.

However, I needn't have worried as about half of the attendees already had plans and ideas of their own on what they were going to work on. There was some overlap between ideas, and there was soon a real buzz to the plans being made. There was no time to lose, and so everyone found a table or a corner of the workshop and got on with making things.

Makie-hacking

A few people had brought things along that they were looking for help in hacking: the guys from Makielab had some of their cool 3D-printed dolls which they were looking to animate - there's a picture of one undergoing brain surgery above; John McKerrell was looking for different directions to push his existing WhereDial IoT location clock (more on that later); and Shaun Myhill from Electric Imp had some of their Imps to easily Internet-of-Thingsify anything, and was helping anyone who was interested do just that.

Cefn Hoile, one of the Howduino crew, also had a load of his super-cheap Arduino-compatible Shrimp kits, and led a packed session on the Saturday afternoon to get most of the attendees up and running with the first Arduino they'd built from bare components.

The Sunday saw more of the same, with the wrap-up being delayed a little to give everyone more time to work on their projects. Even with that, the show-and-tell seemed to come around faster than anyone wanted. The consolation though was getting to see all the cool things that had been created in the space of a weekend!

Show and Tell

In no particular order, here are the projects presented at the end of the event. Some of the attendees could only make it to the first day, and we didn't manage to capture their work. It would've been nice to video them so that we could have included them in the wrap-up, but we only thought of that on the Sunday. Ah well, next time.

POV Poi: After realising there wasn't time to get her laser-cut garden planting calendar finished, Clare Bowman extended her Shrimp board (with a bit of help from Cefn) to provide a persistence-of-vision display. Some last-minute hacking during the show-and-tell(!) saw it fastened into a plastic bag to enable the Poi demonstration captured in the photo above.
Social Media Shelves: Despite going down with a migraine on the second day, Lisa Böhm (with assistance from Jodi Schneider) managed to get the twitter side of her Social Media Shelves project up and running. The aim is to pimp her set of Ikea shelves with different LED lighting in each compartment, which will react whenever there's activity on her assorted social media profiles.
My First Fortune Telling Machine: Jen Allanson arrived at Howduino not knowing anything about electronics or coding but with a vision of an interactive fortune-teller machine, like the Zoltar machine in the movie Big. By the time she left, the first stage was complete, with the mechanism to recognise someone approaching completed.
DirtyWinImp: Antony McLoughlin took an idea he'd come up with during Barcamp Liverpool and turned it into a running prototype - getting the furthest of all the Electric Imp hacks. A light sensor was hooked up to the Imp, which then posted the data through to a Cosm feed. When the light level dropped below a set threshold (showing that the windows were dirty) that would then tweet an alert.
Garden sensor: Mark Holmes and Paul Freeman (in between their duties helping run the event) started to create some sensors that can monitor the status of the soil in your garden. You can see Paul demonstrating their RGB LED display with its ping-pong ball diffuser below. Ulitmately the whole thing will be hooked up to a dashboard allowing you to monitor your garden either using the lights or the dashboard.
Ham Radio Tone Generator: Ian White hooked into the musical expertise of some of his fellow attendees to get his freshly soldered Shrimp Arduino creating suitably smooth tones that he could when tuning his radio set correctly
Network Time Word Clock: Although he seriously overestimated the number of hours in a weekend - Patrick Fenner got the grid to house the LEDs for his word clock laser-cut and wired up the array of charlieplexed LEDs inside, but ran out of time to get the software written to drive them or to query an NTP server to get the time from the Internet.
Shrimp Simon Says: Pat Link took the opportunity to do more work on his Shrimp-powered Simon Says game. He teaches technology and is looking for ways to get young people interested in building things. There's a video where you can see it in action.
Arthouse Film Programme Visualiser: Yuwei Lin worked on a piece to help you see which films were on at FACT or the Cornerhouse (the arthouse cinemas in Liverpool and Manchester) and which languages they were in. Users would be able to use it to see what's on, and compare cinemas. The first step was a series of coloured LEDs that show the language of a film - stage 2 will allow you to compare different cinemas in cities across the country.
Nanowrimo Progress Dial: Building on John's WhereDial, Stu Churchill adapted it so that instead of showing locations, it marks progress through the 50,000 words target for NaNoWriMo. It was a present for his wife, who was a couple of days into the challenge, and would let them know when to celebrate! *fingers crossed!*
Raspberry Pi Plug-socket Remote: Simon Dunton spent the weekend turning a Raspberry Pi into an Internet-connected remote control for some mains plug sockets. Rather than mess around with any dangerous mains voltages, he bought some cheap RF remote control plug sockets and hacked the remote so he could control it from his Pi.

Finally, a big thanks to Andy Goodwin, Cefn Hoile, Paul Freeman and Mark Holmes for helping organise and run things; to LJMU Openlabs and ACME/Kin2Kin for sponsoring; to Thom Shannon and Glow New Media for extra Internets; and DoES Liverpool for providing the venue. And a massive things to everyone who came along, built things, learnt things and provided such a buzzing atmosphere of making.

A Good Paper on the Internet of Things

Sun Nov 11 13:58:31 +0000 2012

Melanie Swan has just had a paper published - Sensor Mania! The Internet of Things, Wearable Computing, Objective Metrics, and the Quantified Self 2.0 - which is a nice snapshot of the Internet of Things landscape and starts to dig into some of the underlying why and how of what IoT could provide.

It’s also chock-full of useful links to relevant projects, platforms and solutions - including two I’m involved with: Bubblino and Good Night Lamp. That’s why it’s getting its own entry in the blog, rather than just a tweet, but it’s worth a read aside from that!

Control surfaces for professionals (and not)

Sat Aug 04 09:00:00 +0100 2012

CC-BY-NC-ND ViaMoi: ~ Play with me... ~

Adrian’s last post discussed affordances – features of devices and controls that provide clues as to how they operate. He mentioned the dimmer switch, where the physical control (a rotary knob) has a superior action to a digital button. It can be rotated very accurately and quickly to the desired setting, instead of having to hold a button down or press repeatedly while checking an LCD for the current value.

This notion that the feel and quality of a controlling action are an important design principle extends far beyond simple light switches to complete devices. Yes, this applies to the Internet of Things, but also to the design of complex objects such as cameras. Here’s what the ever opinionated but highly readable photographer Ken Rockwell has to say about it:

Real cameras have buttons and knobs for making changes instantly. Most [point and shoots] use menus to change even the most basic settings required for every shot, like ISO and white balance. Menus are bogus because they require you to stop paying attention to your photography and redirect it to a screen where you have to play twenty questions to change anything. You can adjust most DSLRs without taking your eye away from the viewfinder. (The Two Classes of Digital Cameras)

A photographer should be able to make adjustments by feel. (What Makes a Great Camera?)

This is a regular theme in Rockwell’s writings. Feel and ease of operation are more important than most “features”, and perhaps even as important as the quality of the final product the device is intended for (the image).

This anecdote stresses the importance of the ease of use over “measurebation”:

I was at a camera shoot-out in Hollywood. We were comparing several $250,000 HDTV cameras. The salesmen from each camera company set up all sorts of static test charts as well as little moving setups to track motion and everything one could imagine.

The guy making the purchasing decision knew every camera would do about the same shooting the charts. Each camera might have 10 or 20 % difference in one parameter or another when measured with instruments. The salesmen and engineers would argue endlessly about this. Unfortunately we can’t even see a 20% difference in resolution with real subjects. Our decision maker was humoring the salespeople as if he was actually interested. Actually he was ignoring this circus of measurebation as far as his choice was concerned.

This studio knew that their cameramen could get the same look from any of these cameras after they tweaked them enough. The choice was made based on which camera could be set up (tweaked) the quickest , and could it get the subjective artistic look they wanted. The key elements were how fast and easy was it to get to these adjustments, and were the correct adjustments even on the camera! (Static Versus Dynamic Image Quality)

So I wondered if this focus on usability and custom controls that be used by feel alone is at odds with Rockwell’s comments about touchscreen controls:

Do you want a pressure-sensitive piano keyboard to pop up? Easy. How about control surfaces for an audio mixer? Done. Want full-time sliders for picture controls and editing? Limited only by the programmers’ imagination. (The Glass Keyboard)

The flexibility and ease of customization is appealing… but isn’t this the opposite of what he was suggesting for the camera? Would a professional pianist prefer a “pressure-sensitive piano keyboard” on a glass panel, or a real piano, with tactile, physical keys, that they can play by feel, by touch, without looking? Would a professional sound engineer prefer a flat control surface or a large board with individual knobs and sliders that they could manage blindfold through years of practice? As a programmer and writer, would I give up my physical keyboard which I can touch-type for hours at a time, in order to get the superior customizability of a programmable glass keyboard?

Perhaps this is a key difference between consumer and professional tools: the consumer wants something that is easily learnable, the professional has learnt the tool. What Rockwell calls “Bogus Menus” may suit the amateur better. In the same way, the menus in GUI applications are explorable and learnable, while key combinations, fast and powerful as they may be, may be arcane and difficult to discover.

Equally, the consumer may want something that fits their needs but won’t pay to get that surface built, whereas the professional might. It simply isn’t cost effective to provide everything that every consumer wants in hardware. Software can give that flexibility and ease of use, and for tasks that aren’t your passion or professions, this may be worth the trade-off against the superior tactility and feel of serious equipment.

This reminded me of Bret Victor’s 2011 piece about “Pictures under Glass”, Future of Interaction Design. This article was an instant classic, and is almost impossible to quote selectively from, but here’s a highlight:

Now, take out your favorite Magical And Revolutionary Technology Device. Use it for a bit. What did you feel? Did it feel glassy? Did it have no connection whatsoever with the task you were performing?

Go read it now! Victor talks passionately about our hands and the three-dimensional world that they manipulate and feel, and compares that experience to the glass screen’s two dimensions that we can control with just the tip of a finger.

There is of course research into making screens tactile. Many devices have experimented with haptic feedback (vibrations that help you find your location by feel as you move between hot spots on the screen). The Tactile Layer technology announced this year is even more interesting, as the keyboard will in fact change shape as microfluids are moved to arbitrary parts of the screen. Though this might be seen as just a gimmick, it is in some sense a realization of the idea of software dynamically affecting the physical world… a core concept around the Internet of Things.

Affordances in the Internet of Things

Fri Jul 27 09:00:00 +0100 2012

CC-BY-NC-SA Cennydd Bowles: Hyper-Norman Door

In his book The Design of Everyday Things, Donald Norman defines affordances as follows:

“Affordances provide strong clues to the operations of things. Plates are for pushing. Knobs are for turning. Slots are for inserting things into. Balls are for throwing or bouncing. When affordances are taken advantage of, the user knows what to do just by looking: no picture, label, or instruction is required. Complex things may require explanation, but simple things should not. When simple things need pictures, labels, or instructions, the design has failed.”

It is an excellent book, and recommended for anyone with an interest in design, although the section on the affordances of doors may ruin your interactions with buildings as you will encounter examples of poorly thought-out design almost daily.

As adoption of the Internet of Things gathers pace, more and more of our cities, homes and environment will become suffused with technology. With these additional behaviours and capabilities will come additional complexity - something that successful designers of connected devices and services will need to counter.

By their very nature, many of the new capabilities bestowed upon objects will be hidden from sight or not immediately apparent from first glance, which makes intuitive design difficult. What are the affordances of digitally-enhanced objects?

How do we convey to the user of an object that it can communicate with the cloud? Or that this device is capable of short-range comminication such as RFID? What does it mean that a toy knows what the temperature is, or when it is shaken? How do you know if your local bus shelter is watching you or, possibly more importantly, why?

An important start is to keep the existing affordances of the object being enhanced. Users who don’t realise that a device has any extra capabilities should still be able to use it as if it hasn’t. Although this sounds like common sense, it is often discarded due to costs or difficulties in design.

For example, a “dumb” light dimmer switch is usually implemented as a rotary knob which gives the user fine-grained control over the brightness; when hooked up to a home-automation system, the difficulties of synchronising the state of both the knob and the light level, now that the brightness can be controlled remotely or automatically, often leads to the knob being replaced by a couple of buttons. As a result the user loses the ability to make both rapid large changes and smaller, fine-grained adjustments. A better approach would be to adopt the system used on many stereo systems where the volume knob is a motorized potentiometer - the user can still adjust it in the conventional manner, and any changes made by the remote are instantly reflected in the position of the volume knob.

Things get trickier with invisible behaviours, but sometimes we can design the physical form of the object to encourage the right behaviour - there isn’t anything inherent in RFID that requires it to be laid out flat in a card, but that leads the user towards the correct interaction of tapping their Oyster card onto the similarly flat reader surface when travelling on the London Underground.

Similar rules apply when designing physical interfaces. Don’t overload familiar connectors with unfamiliar behaviours - 3.5mm audio jacks shouldn’t be used to provide power, although alternative “data”-level uses are probably okay. And if you’re designing a new connector completely then think about ways to prevent the user connecting it the wrong way round. LittleBits have a nice approach in this respect, using magnets to both discourage incorrect connection whilst also encouraging the correct connection.

Money Matters

Wed Jul 18 11:00:00 +0100 2012

CC-BY-NC Ian Britton: Coins

This week, we’re working on, among other chapters, the one on Business Models. Unless you’re making an IoT device for fun, and can afford to bankroll it yourself, you will need some way to pay your bills and eat. So, just to get us into the mood, we’re experimenting with monetizing the blog…

Don’t worry, you can still read all the content on this site for free. Also, we’re not going to place horrible flashing adverts to spoil your Blog of Things reading experience (though if you’re not already using AdBlock, what are you waiting for? ;-)

But if you find this blog useful, or want to get your hands on our book when it comes out, here are some things you can do:

You can already preorder the book on Amazon. Yup, there’s no cover image on there just yet, but the Wiley guys have designed a really nice cover which we’re hoping to share with you soon!
If you have a Kindle, you can subscribe to the blog for £0.99 a month. That gets you all the same content that you can read here, but lovingly formatted for your eBook reader by Amazon’s worker elves for your convenience.
We now have a shop furnished with only the finest Internet of Things supplies.
And you can flattr us.

Also, if you have an IoT business, startup, or project, and an interesting story to tell about it, why not get in touch with @aBookOfThings on twitter, or email hakim at doesliverpool dot com.

OpenIoT: Interview with Hannah Goraya from GIST

Thu Jul 12 18:00:00 +0100 2012

One of the great things at OpenIoT was the chance to meet people from different companies, universities, and groups. Because we mostly work out of a coworking office/events/makerspace in Liverpool, we’re especially interested in talking to people involved in geeky groups/spaces. As well as Laura James from the Cambridge Makespace and Andrew Back of OSHUG, I got to speak to Hannah Goraya (@yorkhannah) about the community space she runs in Sheffield, the GIST lab.

Hannah Goraya: The GIST foundation is a not for profit voluntary organization that was set up in January 2010 by myself, my husband Jag Goraya (@jagusti), Ian Ibbotson (@ianibbo) and Chris Murray (@chrismurray0).
It is a community of interest essentially where people who are interested in developing their technical skills or in meeting other people who are interested in the same kind of technology as them come in and use our space to run events or to attend user groups.

As of June 2012 we’ve just run our 300th event, so we have quite a lot of activity in the space. It’s mainly user groups… programming languages, Arduinos, Rep Raps, and just recently Raspberry Pi.

a Book of Things: So that’s why you were particularly interested in the IOTM kits at the showcase?

Hannah: Yes, we have a “Geek cadets” project as well, so once a month we invite children in to spend a Saturday morning doing things… so we’re really intersted in the Arduino kits. That group has been running for a couple of years.

We have lots of activities, we’re keen to encourage people… and ourselves, most importantly. I enjoy learning about stuff, and that’s how we get interested in what else is going on. And then the community drives a lot of what we’re interested in, because they come in and say “Can we do something on this?” or “Can we use the space to do this?” and the answer is normally yes.

aBoT: We were saying before it was very like the MadLab ethic (http://madlab.org.uk/ is the Manchester Digital Laboratory, another not-for-profit technical social space, also free to more user groups) But you started before them?

Hannah: I don’t know who started first. I think they started just before us. I remember they came up for one of the BarCamps that we ran, and they were talking about doing something at that point, so we had a chat with them then. When we did eventually set up the GIST foundation, when we got the GIST lab – the physical space that we use, we went up to visit them to see how they were doing.

So they do things like the comics and writing groups. We do stuff like that for NaNoWriMo, but we don’t tend to have more regular writing group. One of the groups that used to come in and use our space was set up last year moved on to being something called Overlap, were they go round lots of different venues in the city.

GIST stands for Grassroots Innovation Society and Technology, and we try and keep most of the projects we’re working with now within those themes. We’ve just taken on two new volunteers – we’re all volunteers – who are keyholders, and that’s made it possible to cover a whole lot more events. But we’ve got about 25 user groups and every night of the month bar four (and Sundays, we don’t work Sundays if we can help it) are taken up with activities most months. So we try to keep it within those themes.

aBoT: Do you mostly open for evening events rather than whole day things?

Hannah: We do host whole day events for one-off occasions, but we do one saturday a month, which is the Open Lab, where anyone can bring any kind of project in. That’s quite often web development meetups, and things like the Rep Rap kits, where people can bring in the kit and spend a long time on it. In fact it did start originally because the Rep Rap people were bringing in the kit once a month on a Monday for two or three hours, but it wasn’t really enough to get all the issues and niggles fixed. So we said we’d open up once a month on Saturday, and it’s proved quite popular across the board, with lots of projects, which is nice.

But normally we do evenings from 6:30-9:00 and then everyone goes to the pub… because we’ve got some good local pubs.

We don’t have anything quite as cool as the live “Operation” game that they’ve got…

aBoT: MadLab do have lots of cool toys…

Hannah: We do have some cool stuff too of course! But I’m very envious of that, I’d love to play with that.

aBoT: How did you get your space, the GIST lab?

Hannah: We were really lucky. There’s an organization in Sheffield called the Workstation. They’re part of a big set of buildings, the Showroom (which is our local cinema) and the Workstation. They’re basically very supportive of startups in the local area. The office that we use at the moment, that we call the GIST Lab used to be… have you come across DocFest, the third largest documentary festival in Europe? It’s really big in Sheffield. It’s only maybe a decade old, so it’s still growing. They originally used the office when they were first starting out. And then another digital festival called Lovebytes used the office after that. Then the space was sitting empty, and they said we were in keeping with what they allow to grow in that space, and would we like to use it and see how it goes…

And that’s been really good for us, because it’s part of a bigger building that has different digital and creative businesses in, because that’s what they’re set up for. But we have our own entrance so if we want to use it all evening, we’re not really hassling the rest of the workspace.

For more information on upcoming GIST events see bit.ly/GISTevents

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OpenIoT: Interview with Stefan Ferber from Bosch

Fri Jun 29 09:50:00 +0100 2012

from Wikipedia: The Garden of Earthly Delights, Hieronymus Bosch, 1503-4

My introduction to the Internet of Things has been through the Maker and Arduino communities, which is mostly made up of entrepreneurs, tinkerers, and small companies. Though this group was also very well represented At OpenIoT, it was a fascinating contrast to meet Stefan Ferber (@stefferber), from Bosch, one of the biggest German multinational companies, to get a corporate perspective on the Internet of Things.

a Book of Things: You mentioned that, informally you’re something like a “Representative for the Internet of Things”, but what is your actual job title?

Stefan Ferber: I’m director for communities and partner networks, so that’s why I’m here. I’m the interface to the open source world and crowdsourcing, and I believe it’s a strong player in this market, both in innovation, but also in the way of standardisation. The things that really work. Like the internet has been standardised by the open source world.

aBoT: Very true. So you said “Communities and partner networks”? “Partner networks” could also be commercial entities that you deal with?

Stefan: Yeah, the thing is that sometimes you cannot really distinguish some partner networks. Like with Eclipse for example, which is an open source community, but it is also a strategic board. Then we probably will have partner networks to bring in different domains, so for example standardisation with other companies, and open source groups. Also “communities” can also mean that you’re just doing NGO work.

aBoT: What does a typical day or week involve for you?

Stefan: First of all, I take care that our company strategy is visualised and ordered and we have a blog on that, http://blog.bosch-si.com, which stands for Bosch Software Innovations which is a software system house. We reshaped this blog in December last year, to focus exclusively on the Internet of Things and Services, as we call it, in order to bring in example applications, the technology we are providing, what we see in the marketplace, and this covers a lot of domains: mobility, your home, decentralised energy management, the telemedecine area is also something we’re interested in. Also, even industry production will be changed by the internet.

aBoT: When you said “Telemedicine” is that things like David Rose’s GlowCaps?

Stefan: We have a business division that has the Health Buddy, a small device that communicates with your Doctor. So every morning you answer some questions, it takes your weight reading, even some health parameters. And usually, you progress pretty well, and nothing has to happen. But sometimes something is wrong and the doctor can engage directly.

aBoT: So, is that being trialled?

Stefan: It’s for a couple of years in the market in the US already.

aBoT: Ah! In the US only?

Stefan: Yes. We have got a project in the UK and Ireland. We also had a project in Germany. “Partnership for the heart” was the name in Germany. This was basically a trial.

aBoT: Is that something that the doctors and health services have to buy into as well, to take part in?

Stefan: Yes, that’s a difficult story. Because you have to be part of it, and it’s different in every country… the world of medical insurance, doctor networks, public authorities… it also involves a lot of trials to prove it. So this is a very slow market in terms of market development. We could do much more in this market. Of course there is some risk awareness also, which is ok, but on the other hand it prevents a lot of innovation.

aBoT: And it is something that being a big company like Bosch, you have the leverage to get involved with it, and it’s not as much of a risk for you, as you have money that you can put into long term projects as well.

Stefan: Yes, we are a foundation by nature, so we are not a shareholder company. We can look at this long-term aspect and I think that’s also why “the community” fits pretty well with us. As the money we earn goes to a foundation. And this is a community by itself.

aBoT: That’s Bosch SI particularly?

Stefan: No, the whole of Bosch.

aBoT: Ah! The whole of Bosch is like that? That’s very interesting. In the UK I think, especially in the left wing press, people will occasionally discuss Germany’s more responsible model of capitalism. And this is a good example of that.

Stefan I think it’s also more sustainable. If you look at Germany, several companies run like that, and they are all older than 100 years, and they are still in the Fortune 500. And if you look at how many companies have been in the Fortune 500 a century ago… there aren’t so many! So if you look at sustainability, it’s a very good model. It’s probably not the best model for short-term profit.

aBoT: Which was one of the things in the last panel discussion, that they talked about the US and European different models.

Stefan: Different models, yes. And it has never been our model to have short-term gain. It’s always been sustainable.

Of course we also are a big corporation. But I think we are a little bit more bound to customers, public space. If we sell a security system to an airport, somewhere like in Munich, this is also part of a public service. So, in this business environment, we see them both as stakeholders and customers. I don’t see that much contradiction, just there’s a lot of interest on the table in the marketplace.

aBoT: So, the conference is about the Internet of Things. And you’ve already mentioned telemedicine. Also, of course Bosch in the UK is known especially for white goods and other classic “Things”. So what kind of development are you making in Internet of Things in those areas?

Stefan: First of all we see something that’s cross-cutting all these businesses. That’s why we’re engaging strategically. If you think that all our products will be internet-connected some day, some of them earlier, some of them later… probably a process over the next 20 years, we want to have similar technology to do that. We want our customers to have one access point to our servers behind it. We want that every time you buy a Bosch product you get a login in a web page, that you as a customer have one access point to the company. So this is something we … that’s why we set up this software and system house crosscutting all the other businesses in this respect.

aBoT: OK, and let me challenge you on this a little… because one of the things we’ve been talking about recently is interfacing products that aren’t from the same company: for example Bubblino who blows bubbles, with the WhereDial, which tracks location. So, of course, you being Bosch, can provide many different devices that can speak to each other, but do you have a vision for them talking to other devices that aren’t from Bosch.

Stefan: Yes, it’s pretty clear that we are open to others - an open platform is one of the things that we believe in. And that’s mirrored in our software: 80% of our software platform is open source. Overall it’s more for us deciding which open source components to use, and so it’s easy for others to connect, to inter-operate. And also we discuss with other big players in the market to come to a common agreement. Because there’s no way that we build a world that connects Bosch products alone. It doesn’t make sense. But of course there is a world where we have Bosch services based on the connected products. And if these services even contain products from other companies, we don’t mind.

aBoT: So are you working people like, I don’t know, say Sony (from the consumer side), or Google (from the internet side), or whoever, to work out what what is the protocol that will be letting devices speak to each other and the internet?

Stefan: We’ve had a lot of talks over the last two years and I’d say I hope for the end of this year some good news on that. But it’s still not clear and companies are still trying different things, going different ways. There’s a lot of politics still in there. So just stay tuned to our blog. If we fix that then I think, maybe in November we’ll have something.

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